I have made a few of these major composite pieces over the course of my career, starting in 2009 with Valentino’s Funeral—a large triptych which reimagined all the attendants of the matinee idol’s funeral. This was acquired by a foundation in Richmond, Virginia. In 2011, I made A Real Allegory: Parts II and IIto mark my first solo exhibition in Paris—again, two very large pencil drawings, which were sold to a collection in Basel. Later, in 2017, I made Swansdown, which now hangs in Ridley Scott’s L.A. boardroom/office. Most recently, in 2020, Suzanne Tarasieve asked me to send her Every Time She Builds a Church, which she promptly sold to a private collector—this was the beginning of our journey together.

So you see, these works don’t come along very often, and when they do, I feel they hold great importance for me. Leather has been in the making for 10 years. When I moved from London to Norfolk, I found the background image in a secondhand shop. I tried to source it, but it proved difficult. I knew I loved the image, and I knew it would form the basis for another composite drawing. Here we are 10 years later! Figures have come and gone; they have moved around, stayed, and left. I finally decided to bite the bullet and make the drawing, as I felt the composition had reached a point where it flowed and told a story—each individual ‘player’ in their own world, with the two anonymous gentlemen having breakfast in the foreground as the central focus.

The sunlight is important as it bathes everybody in the scene. There is much ‘wetness’; some narratives are innocent, some less so. As I drew the piece, I thought of the painters I studied at school—Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières, Courbet, Kirchner, and so on. There is a tradition in art history of studying crowds interacting with water. Since releasing an image of the finished drawing, one of my oldest friends - James Birch (curator) - got in touch with me pointing out that the chairs the bathers are sitting on were designed by Ernest Race for the festival of Britain. So this could place the original photo on London’s Southbank in 1951.

It also feels like a sequel to Swansdown, which was set in a disused, eroded lido in the North of England. Marlene Dietrich hovers ghostlike in her swansdown coat—the height of luxury meets the depths of decay. Here, Leather is the title/material—it denotes skin, sex, death, rock and roll, aging, sunlight, dryness, meat, and all sorts of other connotations. For me, it is one word heavily weighted with impact.

Of course, I bring together my cast of idols—as usual. Brando arrives torn and shredded from Mutiny on the Bounty; Dietrich appears to be on the edge of pleasure/pain as she listens overdramatically to her record collection; Tallulah Bankhead is saturated on the set of Hitchcock’s Lifeboat; and a teetering Elvis Presley stands alone, like a Gormley sculpture, on the precipice of falling/jumping. In the foreground, you can see Anne Bancroft preparing for a role as a blind person in The Miracle Worker—she appears to be setting light to the bundle wrapped in a fishing net, which contains the entwined bodies of James Mason and Ava Gardner—only their sodden hands visible—from Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. We mustn’t forget Elizabeth Taylor holding court with her lasso skills on the set of Giant.

For me, it doesn’t matter if you recognize the sprinkling of stars/characters I have brought together—my hope is that they create a new story and that everyone who sees the drawing interacts with it in a different way. It might be the out-of-focus bathers in the background who hold your interest, or the twists and turns of chairs and table legs, or maybe the sunlight filtering through the deckchairs. What’s going on? It’s totally up to you.